Multimedia content creation and consumption is on the rise across a wide variety of devices including cell phones, laptop and desktop computers, and back end cloud services. Such content is created by different parties including individual consumers, corporations, governments, and professional studios. A common need associated with such generated content is to share the content only with authorized parties, and to provide a statement of ownership or indication of source in the content. With the adoption of cloud based web services, content sharing has been achieved traditionally by providing access control services to individuals through accounts provided through web services, for example. However, once the content is uploaded to a given cloud service, ownership and access to underlying content is often surrendered to the service provider and any party able to download and then manipulate the downloaded content.
In the drawings, the leftmost digit(s) of a reference number identifies the drawing in which the reference number first appears.